Change of Heart (5 page)

When he looked down at her, the color of his dark eyes seemed to change. “You’re not like the women I usually have, but I guess you’ll do.” He gave her a lascivious, one-sided smirk. “The softness of you might make for a nice change from bony models and starlets.”

At that remark, made as though he were in a butcher’s shop poking chickens for tenderness, she brought her knee up sharply between his legs. He rolled off her in pain. “Now, Mr. Taggert,” she said as she stood up and bent over him, “just what is this all about?”

He was holding himself with one hand, and as he rolled to one side, his injured shoulder hit the table leg. Miranda’s heart
almost
went out to him.

“I’m a . . .”

“A what?” she demanded.

“A billionaire.”

“You’re a—?” She didn’t know whether to laugh or kick him in the ribs. She couldn’t conceive of the amount of money he was talking about. “You’re rich, so you think I came up here to . . . to get your money?”

He was beginning to recover as he pulled himself up to sit heavily on a chair. “Why else would you be here?”

“Because you asked for a nurse,” she shot at him. “You
hired
me.”

“I’ve heard
that
story before.”

She stood looking down at him, glaring, more angry than she’d ever before been. “Mr. Taggert, you may have a great deal of money, but when it comes to being a human being, you are penniless.”

She didn’t think about what she was doing, that she was in the Rocky Mountains and had no idea how to get back to civilization. She just grabbed her sweater from the back of the couch and walked out of the cabin.

Still raging in anger, she followed a bit of a trail, but she didn’t look where she was going.

Not even Leslie had ever made her as angry as this man just had. Leslie lied to her and manipulated her at every chance, but he’d never accused her of being indecent.

She went uphill and down, unaware of the growing dark. One minute it seemed to be sunny and warm, and the next moment it was pitch-dark and freezing. Putting on her sweater didn’t help at all.

“Are you ready to return?”

When the man spoke, she nearly jumped out of her skin. Whirling about, she could barely see him standing hidden amid the trees.

“I don’t think I will return to the cabin,” she said. “I’m going back to Denver.”

“Yes, of course. But Denver is that way.” He pointed in the direction opposite to the way she was walking.

She wanted to keep some of her pride. “I wanted to . . . to get my suitcase.” She looked from one side to the other for a moment, then charged straight ahead.

“Ahem,” he said, then pointed over his right shoulder.

“All right, Mr. Taggert,” she said, “you’ve won. I haven’t a clue where I am or where I’m going.”

He took two steps around her and parted some bushes with his hand, and there, about a hundred yards in front of her, was the cabin. Light glowed softly and warmly from the windows. She could almost feel the warmth of the fire.

But she turned away, toward the path leading to Denver, and started walking.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“Home,” she said, just as she stumbled over a tree root in the trail. But she caught herself and didn’t fall. With her back straight, she kept walking.

He was beside her in moments. “You’ll freeze to death out here. If a bear doesn’t get you first, that is.”

She kept walking.

“I am ordering you to—”

Halting, she glared up at him. “You have no right to order me to do anything. No right at all. Now, would you please leave me alone? I want to go
home
.” To her horror, her voice sounded full of tears. She’d never been able to sustain anger for very long. No matter what Leslie did to her, she couldn’t stay angry for more than a short time.

Straightening her shoulders, she again started walking.

“Could I hire you as my cook-housekeeper?” he said from behind her.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to work for you,” she answered.

“Really?” he asked, and he was right behind her. “If you’re poor—”

“I am
not
poor. I just have very little money. You, Mr. Taggert, are
very
poor. You think everyone has a price tag.”

“They do, and so do you. So do I, for that matter.”

“If you think that, you must be a very lonely man.”

“I’ve never had enough time alone to consider what loneliness is. Now, what can I offer you to make you cook for me?”

“Is
that
what you want? My pot roast?” At this thought there came a little spring to her step. Maybe she
did
have something to offer. And maybe she wouldn’t have to spend the night running down a mountain being chased by a bear.

“Five hundred dollars a week,” he said.

“Ha!”

“A thousand?”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” she said with great sarcasm.

“What then? What do you want most in the world?”

“The finest education the world has to offer for my son.”

“Cambridge,” he said automatically.

“Anywhere, just so it’s the best.”

“You want me to give your son four years at Cambridge University for one week’s cooking? You’re talking thousands.”

“Not four years. Freshman to PhD.”

At that Frank laughed. “You, lady, are crazy,” he said, turning away from her.

She stopped walking and turned to look at his back. “I saw wild strawberries up here. I make French crepes so light you can read through them. And I brought fresh cream to be whipped and drenched in strawberries, then rolled in a crepe. I make a rabbit stew that takes all day long to cook. It’s flavored with wild sage. I saw some ducks on a pond near here, and you would not believe what I can do with a duck and tea leaves.”

Frank had stopped walking.

“But then you’re not interested, are you, Mr. Billionaire? I bet you could toast hundred-dollar bills on a stick over the fire and they would no doubt taste yummy.”

He turned back to her. “Potatoes?”

“Tiny ones buried under the fire coals all day so they’re soft and mushy, then drizzled with butter and parsley.”

He took a step toward her. When he spoke, his voice was low. “I saw bags of flour.”

“I make biscuits flavored with honey for breakfast and bread touched with dill for dinner.”

He took another step toward her. “PhD?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, thinking of Eli in that venerable school and how much he’d love it. “PhD.”

“All right,” he said, as though it were the most difficult thing he’d ever agreed to.

“I want it in writing.”

“Yes, of course. Now, shall we return to the cabin?”

“Certainly.” With her head held high, she started to walk past him, but he pulled aside a curtain of bushes. “Might I suggest that this way would be quicker?”

Once again, not a hundred yards away, was the cabin.

As she walked past him, her nose in the air, he said, “Thank heaven your cooking is better than your sense of direction.”

“Thank heaven
you
have money enough to
buy
what you want.”

She didn’t see the way he frowned as she continued walking. If the truth were told, Frank Taggert wasn’t used to being around women who didn’t fawn over him. Between his good looks and his money, he found he was quite irresistible to women.

But then he usually didn’t have anything to do with women like this one. Most of the women he escorted were the long-legged, perfect sort, the kind who wanted sparkling baubles and nothing else from him. He’d found that if he grew bored with one of them, if he gave her enough jewelry, she soon dried her tears.

But this one had had a chance at a great deal of money and she’d asked for something for someone other than herself.

As he watched her walk back to the cabin, he wondered about her husband. What was he like to allow his wife to go alone into the mountains to take care of another man?

Once he was inside the cabin, he sat down hungrily at the table and waited while she served the meal she’d cooked. She made herself a plate and took it into the living area, put it on the heavy pine coffee table, sat on the floor, and began to eat as she watched the fire.

Annoyed, and with great difficulty because he was one-handed, he picked up his plate and flatware and moved it to the coffee table. He’d no more than sat down when she lifted her plate and took it to the table.

“Why did you do that?” he asked, greatly annoyed.

“The hired help doesn’t eat with Mr. Billionaire.”

“Would you stop calling me that? My name is Frank.”

“I know that, Mr. Taggert. But what is
my
name?”

For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. But then, considering the circumstances under which she’d told him her name, his lack of memory was understandable. “I don’t remember,” he said.

“Mrs. Stowe,” she answered, “and I was hired as your
nurse.”

She was behind him, seated at the dining table, and when he twisted around, causing pain to shoot through his shoulder, he saw that she had placed herself with her back to him. Frowning in annoyance, he moved to the table across from her.

“Would you mind telling me who hired you?” he asked. The chicken was indeed delicious, and he thought a week away from canned food was going to be worth sending some kid to school—well, almost, anyway. Maybe he could write off the expense as charity. This could be advantageous tax-wise if he—

“Your brother.”

Frank nearly choked. “My
brother
hired you? Which one?”

She still refused to look at him, but he could see her shoulders stiffen. They weren’t fashionably square shoulders, but rather round and soft.

“It seems to me, Mr. Taggert,” she said, “that a rather unpleasant joke has been played on you. I would hate to think that you had more than one brother who would have such animosity toward you as to instigate such a joke.”

Frank well knew that each of his brothers would delight in playing any possible trick on him, but he didn’t tell her that.

After her remark about his brothers he didn’t speak again but tried to give his attention to the food. She wasn’t going to put his French chef out of business, but there was a comforting, homey flavor to the food, and the portions were man-sized. In his house in Denver, his apartment in New York, and his flat in London, each of his chefs served calorie-controlled meals to ensure Frank’s trim physique.

She finished eating, then silently cleared her place and his, while Frank, feeling deliciously full, moved to the couch and watched the fire. He’d never been a man who smoked, but when she served him a tiny cup of excellent coffee, he almost wished he had a cigar. “And a plump woman to share my bed,” as his father used to say.

Relaxed, drowsy, he watched the woman as she moved about the room, straightening things. But then she stood on a chair and drove a nail into the ceiling beam that ran between the two beds. “What are you doing?”

“Making separate rooms,” she answered. “Or as close as I can come to it.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Stowe, that that is not necessary. I have no intention of imposing myself on you.”

“You’ve made yourself clear as to your thoughts of my . . . of my feminine appeal, shall we say?” She drove another nail, then tied a heavy cotton rope from one nail to another.

Aghast, Frank watched her drape spare blankets over the rope, effectively creating a solid boundary between the two beds. He stood up. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for me. You see, Mr. Billionaire, I don’t like you. I don’t like you at all, and I’m not sure anyone else in the world does either. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a bath.”

Minutes later, Miranda stepped into a tub of water so hot it made her toes hurt, but she needed the warmth, needed the heat to thaw her heart. Being near Frank Taggert was like standing near an iceberg. She wondered if he had ever had any human warmth in him, whether he’d ever loved anyone. She’d like to think he was like one of her romantic heroes: wounded by some callous woman, and now his cold exterior protected a soft, loving heart.

She almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of the idea. All evening he’d been watching her speculatively; she could feel his eyes even through her back. He seemed to be trying to decide where she belonged in the world. Rather like an accountant would try to figure out where an expense should be placed.

“At least Leslie had passion,” she whispered, lying back in the tub. “He lied with passion, committed adultery with passion, made money with passion.” But when she looked into this Frank Taggert’s eyes, she saw nothing.
He
would never lie to a woman about where he’d spent the night because he’d never care whether or not she was hurt by his infidelity.

All in all, she thought it was better not to think about Mr. Billionaire. With longing, she wondered what Eli and Chelsea were doing tonight. Would Eli eat properly if she wasn’t there? Would he ever turn off his computer and go to bed if she didn’t make him? Would he get seasick? Would—?